


moonlit and drowned

by closet_monster



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Hurt, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26565403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closet_monster/pseuds/closet_monster
Summary: Nesta is startled by the night and it's undisputed haunting - being a ghost herself, she joins the crying for once.
Relationships: Nesta Archeron/Cassian
Comments: 15
Kudos: 49





	moonlit and drowned

**Author's Note:**

> hello it is I Ste. I come forth bringing an angsty oneshot because we're fueled by the continuous longing. Forgive me if the ending sucks I wrote the last 10 paragraphs rum drunk. Also for any mistakes. Because I proof read this drunk. Do tell me and I'll fix it as soon as I see it. Hope you can enjoy this! Bye kisses stay safe and be happy

Nesta found it harder to breathe during the night. She wasn't quite sure why.

But every single night before bed and usually, up until the very moment she closed her eyes, Nesta would forget how to breathe. The air didn't just come in and then, it usually stayed caged in her lungs until she remembered and her body pushed it out. For half or a full hour, she'd have to force herself to breathe into sleep - it wasn't always painless. In Illyria, the night air was cold and it struck sharp; sometimes freezing her already sore throat, sometimes her chest burned, sometimes it was the pressure on the top of her lungs, when she failed to exhale after so long.

And waking up, Nesta was never sure if she had fallen asleep or passed out the night before.

In the morning, the cold was leveled with sadness. In the afternoon, bathed in warning. During night and up until dawn, it whistled like danger.

No living day was real. Nesta waded through life like a phantom ship at high sea, both silent and full, hauntingly beautiful and above sinking - since she was too dead to drop any further. Both furious and heart-breakingly calm, her breath a unsteady tune to it's own melody. The muses - her insides sang: wretched screams from a tortured soul, desperate ghosts begging for peace, enslaved monsters growling to themselves in resigned hopelessness. Horns like crossed swords adorning notes sweet as honey, a song carried through the unforgiving mountain winds.

Those she couldn't always force through her lungs.

Somewhere across her second month up there, Nesta tosses and turns in her burrowed bed until her covers fall to the cold wooden floor, sheets clawed from under the mattress that smelled like wood and fennel. She had blacked out good twenty minutes after Cassian stopped making noise outside, the air so thick that her vision had gone gray even though her eyes had been somewhat open. The howling mountain wolves - and the bewildered muts that followed them, woke her up somewhere before midnight. She tossed herself to sleep again and woke up a second time with the brutal winds that knocked at the windows with shockingly strong violence. After that, it took two more hours of turning above a bare mattress that scrapped her thin skin until Nesta decided that she'd either leave the damned bedroom or die.

Tentative footsteps were lightly muffled by the thick socks she'd been given upon her arrival; Nesta turned the doorknob to her bedroom so carefully, it made absolutely no sound as she pulled it open. With her feet planted on the dark corridor, she holds her breath to make sure Cassian is still peacefully sound asleep in his bedroom - and she only steals one quick glance to his wide open door before following. Silently creeping out of the house, she tries to block the image of the gigantic general comfortably laid in his bed, leathery wings lazily draped over his back and tangled with heavy covers she had worn a couple of weeks before him.

Nesta had absolutely no destination in mind. She didn't want to go anywhere - and most definitely had nowhere else to go. She didn't have any friends, wasn't allowed in most places - and the general hostility kept her out of the places that she was supposedly allowed to set foot on.

By Cassian, she had been forbidden from taverns; by the other camp lords, she had been forbidden from every other place where she might have come across females and children. That ruled out the kitchens, restaurants, halls, markets, rivers, clearings, nurseries and the fucking infirmaries. Some part of her ached because of their irrational fear - she didn't understand it. Nesta was simply a woman, too young and hurt, wronged, bitter, cold at will, but she had no evil bone in her body. Nesta remembers holding a head in her hands, but that had been all - she was only a girl and so far, despite her ages of unnatural sorrow, entirely harmless. She couldn't understand being feared and despised by so many strangers, but in the end, Nesta didn't have it within herself to question them.

Most days, she dreaded the necessity of having to leave her bedroom at all; venturing through Illyria and spooking anyone was far from her wishes. But she steps outside anyway, closing the backdoor so it didn't slam with the wind, and sat on the humid deck leading to the ground.

Summer was coming to an end, if it hadn't happened already: grass was dead and dry, the constant marching was stirring the dirt until the humidity turned it into mud, and all color was disappearing increasingly fast, the air only getting colder by the minute. Nesta was aware that the entire season was an ultimatum for winter - had been told by Cassian, who probably didn't realize that she was actually listening, that winter in the mountains was so brutal, her body was likely to break.

She knew it was true: harmless summer breeze had Nesta shaking to the bone, winter in the mountains would have her bed ridden in a week. Still, she didn't care enough to try and eat. Or accept to be trained.

Their neighbors: out the back, there were three other houses within hearing range. The one directly in front of theirs was of a severe widowed healer and her apprentice daughter. Mother was clipped, daughter was not. They came over for Cassian more often than not and she had been taken to their house once, so that they could protect her frail organism from old mountain diseases that could come - those were the few illyrians who would trade any words with her.

Nesta sometimes fantasized that the girl wasn't any older than a century and that they could be friends - which was probably unlikely.

Cassian had once said that it was a shame the healer's daughter didn't want to be trained with the other girls, with her being so strong and bearing so much magic - Nesta thought it was foolish of him to try and see destruction even in the very few who had the power to fix and create. _Now,_ Nesta was untamed destruction, her blood full of silver thunder and dancing flames, the end of the world was a pool sitting in the pit of her stomach - and she wished that she could have been anything else. Like a healer's daughter, quiet and unbothered, whole, peaceful, hands full of power to fix all that was broken.

But she bit it back every time.

She said nothing, not when she was prompted and most definitely not when she actually wanted to speak. Nesta had a feeling he could decipher her voiceless words with a single look, anyway. His miserable or passive agressive frowns were quite telling.

 _You are dying, Nesta. You are sick, Nesta. Look, how unforgiving you are. You are petty and stubborn, Nesta. I can't believe you. You make_ me _sick, you're tiresome. Looking at you hurts. I'm disappointed, Nesta. Why can't you try? Why aren't you willing to try? Why do you want to hurt me? Why don't you care?_

Two months of quiet, Nesta can get through Cassian's voiceless words as easily as he can do hers.

Still, he talks - still, he's there.

Nesta a ghost, Cassian had to be something kin to her gray tombstone. Old, cracked, holding names and dates that no longer meant anything to the living. A partner undisturbed, the only thing connecting her gone soul to the world. An anchor, an outlet, a safekeeping temple.

 _Why do you want to hurt me?_ \- he had it all wrong. Nesta never wanted to hurt him, never wanted him to be anything close to mildly inconvenienced. Cassian took over a big chunk of her heart: she didn't show, had trouble eyeing the feelings, but they were there. She never wanted him to hurt, never wanted him to suffer and never wanted to be the cause. It's why she had left in the first place: Nesta didn't want to be the reason anyone sunk lower than the dirt by correlation.

Successfully, no one followed. They weren't there, never questioned or pushed against any of her actions to distance herself, not from the first and not from the last - in fact, the last had been entirely their doing. Feyre had decided that she no longer wanted Nesta instead and thus, she had been banned altogether from her sister's city.

Still, Cassian took her. Still, Cassian stayed. Nesta didn't want to hurt him, still, he didn't go away.

She did nothing anymore, because disappearing was the one last thing she could do. Nesta did nothing. How was she paining anyone?

Nesta woke up and breathed, kept her eyes open, sometimes thought about things, forced her lungs to work every night and willed herself to disturbed sleep - still, somehow, she seemed to be the great cause of every single one of Cassian's troubles. And her sister's, too, from the one letter she had been sent after the first month.

A living being barely alive, who took little to no space, ate just enough to keep her body turning, kept quiet and out of everyone's sight - still, Nesta seemed to be consciously wicked and entirely made out of evil. Try as she might, Nesta had absolutely no idea of how she could be possibly inflicting anyone at that point. She didn't know what was happening: what day it was, if summer was still breaking over or if it was winter around the corner - she couldn't tell, couldn't feel.

Just that the utter despair she found in Cassian's eyes every single day made her stomach churn and she only ever wanted to hide from him. Most days, couldn't stand the memory of how he stared into her sick body, he frowned, looked down, looked furious, looked anxious, looked like he was seconds away from slamming his fists into something and screaming. How the kitchen was a place of sadness that neither could stand without being drowned in guilt.

Cassian, for making himself eat like a dog when Nesta couldn't force any more than a single dry cracker down her throat when he wasn't looking; or Nesta, for not making herself eat when Cassian looked like he was about to cry over his food. How he quietly cooked, dreading the five seconds it would take to offer her a plate and then to accept the silence as an answer. And how Nesta listened from whatever corner of the house she hid from him, shaking when she heard the pans and utensils being moved, the smell filling the air, dreading those five seconds it would take him to offer and then give up.

Sadness was a place, Nesta believed, and it was their house.

The wind changes, the temperature drops harder - Nesta lets go of the thought with no resistance whatsoever.

Her mind is clear like glass in the blink of an eye and she notices: her chest aches like it's about to burst. Her lungs, pained, because she hadn't been breathing this entire time. If Nesta didn't force them into motion, if she trusted her body to work without command - it wouldn't. Her first breath is ragged, loud, desperate. It takes time to settle, for her heart to slow down again, still the pain doesn't cease.

The winds swiped her unbound hair to the sides, she forgets again. Let her mind roam free, eyes mindlessly travelling by the ugly field stretching in front of her and the other houses surrounding them. Their neighbors all slept, lights down - the wind was the loudest thing about the entire camp.

That and the awful noise her throat made with every painful breath she took.

It was loud - loud enough that Cassian awoke. She knows that because the sound of his careful and still heavy footsteps hitting the stairs were somehow in synchrony with her frantic heartbeat and also because Nesta always knew where he was, didn't she? As if she were a map, a compass and a string, pulled forward with his every move. Nesta could feel his hurt, see his staring despite the walls, hear his voice inside the silence, his existence woven to hers as if they were one.

She sometimes wondered if he could feel the same.

And usually came to the conclusion that he didn't.

His steps falter in the kitchen. Cassian had probably seen her through the windowpanes, sitting in the cold outside like a misbehaved dog waiting out it's punishment. Was likely wondering what sort of insanity had stricken her - and Nesta remembers that she knew of no hysteric females in this side of the world. Human women went insane more often than not: their families either kept them chained to their rooms or eventually sold them out to another place. Their names became forbidden words no one could mutter, entire families broken and shamed -

Nesta thought herself to be hysterical sometimes: she was entirely dismantled, her systems did not work. But she was no human, not anymore.

What did the fae do of their hysterical females? Nesta had never heard of them.

The door is open, Nesta flinches, but forgets again. Mind clear, this time like crystalline water. The warming heat from the house washes over her for a second and she deigns to look back, ears trained in Cassian's every movement. _His sensitive wings ruffle under the cold wind, pressed to his back in an almost thin line; fingers flexed into a tight fist and then awkwardly released, light on his feet and ready to move, breathing through his mouth, eyes closed and handsome face contorted in something that was both sadness and exhaustion._

Nesta suppresses the shudder that comes from realizing that she could _see_ him without looking.

Her shoulders tense while she waits for him; something, anything. A reprimand, a reaction, a complaint, or silent judgement that makes her insides turn in guilt for hours on end. Whatever would end _this_ faster. But he speaks nothing, Nesta hears nothing. Not even those soundless curses that make her want to disappear. There's no _"Why, Nesta? Please come inside. Please stop being like this. What are you doing here? Do you hate yourself? Can't you feel the cold, tell the hours? Are you still so intent on dying?"_

Instead, the old wood groans as Cassian lazily moves to the end of the deck, sitting beside her with no grace or flourish - not that Nesta could muster any herself. She was far too sick to hold any sort of control over her body; most days, inching closer to a frayed rag doll than the strong woman she once had been. And she goes as far as staring, angling her head to watch his face, trying to ask _"And what are you doing here? Why, Cassian?"_

She says nothing - somehow, Cassian listens.

His face is as clear as hers might be, eyes lost in time like hers, dark circles proving that his sleep had been just as taunt. Cassian stretches his wing behind her back, sharp tallon gently curling over her shoulder like a warm cloak, shielding her from the harsh wind - Nesta sees herself leaning closer to him without much thought, letting her head lightly rest on his shoulder with eyes closed. It's Illyria's northeast: morning comes as slowly as a threat, the wind calms from it's violent raging. Nesta's breathing falls in place with Cassian's until her chest eases again, until it doesn't hurt anymore, until she willingly gives up staying awake over him.

Somewhere across her second month up there, Nesta is carried back to bed, chest light and sound asleep.

Some sort of nameless peace washes over her hurt.

**Author's Note:**

> this was made from my poor little heart hope you like it


End file.
